What is the "Community Protection Policies and Procedures"?

This is an official re-release of what has been known as the "Global In-Game Rules." You will see over the next few days references and posts regarding the Global In-Game Rules changed to reflect the rebranding of our policies.

While some aspects of the rules and policies have been changed significantly, overall you will find that the rules as a whole are not undergoing a drastic change. We encourage all players to review these new policies, however, to avoid any unintentional violations.

Why the change?

We have heard you, the players of Neverendless, and your concerns about how the Staff currently handles player infractions: both from the point of view of the player receiving consequences and from the point of view of those making reports.

We would like to emphasize that the role of the Staff, and specifically the Inquisitorial Squad and other departments charged with "keeping the peace," should not be defined by the punishments and consequences handed out. Rather, the Staff have a duty to protect the community, ensuring that all players can enjoy a safe, welcoming, and entertaining experience here at our server.

To that end, of course from time to time consequences must be handed out to those players disrespecting the guidelines set for the community. However, these consequences should be fair and reasonable, based on the offense committed, and should have an overall positive impact on the server and its community rather than serving merely to "punish."

While it has never been our intention to enforce unfair policies or unreasonable consequences, feedback from the community as a whole is important and we have taken your thoughts and concerns into consideration. In addition, we hope that the new Community Protection ideas will be more clear to players so that they may avoid violations.

Sadly, it is a fact that from time to time there are players in our community who are here to do the community no positive impact. They may cause negative impact by choosing to disrespect our players and our Staff, as well as violate one or many of our rules: these players will not be permitted to remain on the server as long as their disruptive behavior continues. It is in this way that we commit to serving you, the players of Neverendless, in protecting your community.

How will this affect me?

In fact, how the new Community Protection Policies and Procedures affect the individual player has a lot to do with each individual player. If you are a rule-violator, beware! ;) In all seriousness, players who choose to violate rules should be aware that as always, the Staff will not tolerate such behavior. You can read specifically about what is tolerated and what is not in the official Community Protection Policies and Procedures article in the Knowledge Base.

We do understand that "gamers will be gamers," and we understand that a certain amount of rowdy behavior is to be expected and perhaps even desired in our community. However, you will find that when a player crosses the line, our system of warnings and consequences will provide at first a gentle reminder to give you a chance to change your actions. If you persist, you will receive consequences which can range from a mute to an account ban, to a permanent, server-wide ban. A server-wide ban will include your IP, all accounts connected to you, and will cross all of Neverendless's services (In-Game, TeamSpeak, Forums and IRC).

If you are a player reporting a rule violation, we hope that you will find that our new Procedures are more effective in stopping unwanted and offensive behavior. We hope that this system will better enable us to not only stop ongoing unwanted actions but discourage future occurrences, thus providing a cleaner, happier community for all.

How you report violations will not change: we encourage you to make an in-game ticket or to fill out a Player Report support ticket. As always, clear and helpful screenshots are encouraged. Please do keep in mind that in-game functions such as /ignore and the mature language chat filter may be used to modify your experience without the need for a player report. The Staff are charged with handling serious offenses that may not be mitigated with these functions.

Bottom line, again we want to provide a safe and entertaining community experience for all players without going overboard with rules to the point that the game is not enjoyable.

How does this affect the Staff?

The Community Protection Policies and Procedures aims to give the Staff more clear guidelines on what is tolerable, what is not, and what are the appropriate actions to be taken for each report. Of course we will not share all our secrets and the details about how Staff carry out their duties, but the bottom line is that you should see less variation in the handling of reports among Staff members.

There has been a persistent perception that Staff is corrupt or that we enjoy showing off our power. Neverendless as a whole, Blackswann, and myself have a very high standard for the Staff and we do not tolerate abuse of power in any way, shape or form. If a Staff member ever treats a player in a way that is disrespectful or shows an abuse of power, please do not hesitate to make a Staff Report support ticket. Of course it is our hope that this should never happen, but when a report is made we take it very seriously and handle it accordingly.

What are some of the major changes?

Again, please do fully read the new Community Protection Policies and Procedures. However, some of the more noticeable changes include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Spam rules have changed to better allow players to assemble in-game groups without allowing chronic, malicious spammers to overtake or flood the chat.
• Warnings will be given with a kick and a mail rather than an in-game chat warning from a Staff member.
• Mute Avoiding and Ban Avoiding are (almost) a thing of the past: if you are muted on a character, you are free to play another character provided that you do not further violate rules on that character. Bans will be per account (with the exception of cases meriting a server-wide ban) and therefore you may play your other accounts while serving your ban, again, provided that you do not further violate rules on your additional accounts.
• Repeat offenders will be more carefully tracked and dealt with accordingly. Do not expect to be a chronic rule violator and to remain free to play on our server.
• Consequences for violations should more reasonably scale depending on the severity of the offense. (Occurrences of overly harsh punishments shall no longer arise.)

Again, these are just some of the highlights: please be sure to fully understand the new Policies so that you may avoid unintentionally violating rules and/or making reports that are not merited.

Our Community

I am proud to be a part of Neverendless, the server with not only the most advanced and feature-rich in-game and out-of-game experience, but that which has the BEST community of any private server out there. It is you, our players, who make our community as awesome as it is today! We, the Staff, will continue to strive to protect this community and to provide the best possible private server experience, period!

Thank you, Neverendless, for making us what we are today and all we will be in the future!

Ysabel would you go in a date with me?

^thats sad kid

And is it just me or is the Community Protection Policies and Procedures link broken?

I found that "Account Deletions If we find that you are trash" was too funny to handle.

/lick

All links should be working now, but please do let me know if you find any other broken ones. :)

Warnings will be given with a kick and a mail rather than an in-game chat warning from a Staff member.
I liked the gm warning better :(

Interesting, let's hope its actually enforced and not just more empty threats. Id love to come back to NE and see this come to fruition. Not just the new mute protocol, Id also love to see certain community members held accountable for abuse of rank or position. However i disagree with one point, there is definitely an issue with people abusing certain "privileges" Failure to address this is only going to further alienate community members, There seems to be a forward momentum in NE now, and i love it, lets ride that wave and keep making this the best possible environment for new players, even if it makes us look at the faults we don't want to face. I'm sure someone will chime in soon with cliches and excuses and general qq but remember, denial isn't a river in Egypt.

Long story short, please?

Long story short, please read the new Policies, and there is a summary at the bottom of that for those who want the quick version. ;)

Did something in particular prompt these changes or?

I found the system currently employed does the job the majority of the time already......Don't fix what's not broken :)

Great! Finally some movement with that as well. :)

Thank you!

Useful policies to ban the idiots who defame the server.

Ysabel may i have questions please ?

--> Intentional, excessive spam is not tolerated at all. (from forums)

is this includes looking for players for dungeons / raid in chat channels like global, world and trade ?

(just wanted to know what is difference for lapse of time to use same in some channels , i used to lf players in different channels over a minute and repeat the sequence in different chat channels .)

also dps meter status shown in raid /party channels is not considered as spam right ?

It's about time all these trolls learn their lesson.

Yeah, spam was getting out of control. Especially people who spam there name over and over in global.. ^lol

Just gonna say.. lolololololol.

[Hov Hov Hov Hov Hov Hov Hov Hov Hov Hov Hov Hov Hov Hov Hov Hov Hov Hov Hov Hov ]

Anyways, thanks NE for eliminating moar problems from the server. Not gonna go into an essay about it but yeah, long story short, great job.

Raid/party channels are not generally governed by spam rules; however, if it is a staff hosted raid/party you can expect some moderation, or if there is a serious complaint we will of course investigate. Also, the guidelines for spam have changed in such a way that LFG-type messages should be less likely to get you warned/muted for spam as long as you are being reasonable, while true spam will be treated accordingly.

The reason for the change was partly addressed in the article: the aim of this system is on the staff side to help better define guidelines for staff, to better address the concerns of the community regarding how staff handle player infractions, and to hopefully provide a more effective system that is less likely to allow "repeat offenders" to continue their offenses without repercussions.

Now, to address the somewhat common complaint heard in ban appeals and reports: the posting of the rules serves as warning, particularly for severe offenses. We do not believe that the most severe offenses (such as advertising, just as ONE example) are accidental, nor are they deserving of an in-game warning after the offense has occurred. You don't get a second chance with a major violation. It is the duty of every player to understand the rules and the possible consequences for breaking them. If you think you are ever muted or banned "without warning," think again! What you can and cannot do/say is clearly posted. If it is not clear to you, please don't assume anything but rather ask a staff member for clarification. The defense "I didn't know this was going to get me muted/banned" is not likely to get your mute/ban reduced/lifted.

I can agree with the rules, however I do notice a few flaws in them:
-some staff are not up-to-date with current rules. (proven repeatedly. some staff still go by the 3-lines rule, others by 2, and some don't use any)
-rules are subject to interpretation by the staff monitoring. what is 'vulgar' to some may not be to others.
-they still dont identify "offensive" content. example: getting warned for a comment deemed as racism, when it is a comment on an ingame item that is similar in appearance to another. if a person asks, they SHOULD receive a response indicating just what it was that was offensive.

as for the kicking thing...it is a bit...meh. warnings work better in some cases, when they were getting just that little bit out of hand. the rule seems to read as "once a person has been warned (in their lifetime), then any and all subsequent violations will result in an instant kick (at any time of day, or day of week) results in escalating consequences, up to and including bans.
I know it will not likely be interpreted as such, but it could be, and that is the problem as I see it...

Hmmm... Cookies!

You write a lot missy, I'm here to play a game not read a book,

Please give us the shorter version

Guess gonna have to go with Trial and error for now

this is good news for our community and those who seem to not like this idea are very well likely the one's abusing the rules ! so good stuff NE this will hopefully fix alot of the rule violators !!

Regards,

GoDzSpAwN

Woah there...
Maybe you should read the rules I don't want you to be muted or banned :'(

NE just keeps working on epic things for the community :D
I really appriciate everything u guys are doing for us (maybe to get more people on the server=more monay but still)
A while back the forums were kinda dead, and there weren't any new stuff for the server in general, now u guys jump up with a new and awesome thing like every week!

Thanks and great work NE!

What about emotes ? I got muted for 2 hours for doing /lick 6 times 2 weeks ago w/o warning ;(

There is a short summary version of the new Policies at the bottom. And keep in mind, we are not responsible for you not knowing the rules because you didn't read them.

In response to the concern about staff being inconsistent with the rules--all staff are being retrained with these new procedures. Something that happened two weeks ago won't have been affected by the retraining, of course.

Spam is spam--whether it is an emote or not, so please keep that in mind. ;)

Yes, we do understand that the interpretation of chat as "vulgar" or "offensive" is somewhat subjective, however staff are being given example guidelines which should help make things a bit more standardized. A reminder: if you are in strong disagreement with how something is handled, please feel free to make a support ticket (either for Feedback or as a Staff Report). This may help us to redefine our definitions if needed or to address an individual staff member's handling of a matter. We are all human and of course we can make mistakes. Our aim is to reduce and eliminate that problem, and you can help us do it.

Overall, honestly, it should be simple to avoid run-ins with the IS with the use of a bit of common sense. ;)

Quick question on vulgarity/offensive statements, is "@$$" still more offensive then "Rape"?
Of course I mean using actual letters for the first set of quotes

if NE dont want all the donorbashing then do like retail :)dont let the horde and ally talk togetter then alot of the donorbashing problem ower